One of the main obstacles for the reader of Rick Moody's suburban fiction is the obvious comparison with John Cheever and John Updike. Loud and bloated has been the praise heaped upon Moody's new book, Purple America (Flamingo, £16.99 in UK). Loud and equally bloated may prove your disappointment on reading it. Loud here is apt, so too is bloated. This is a big book attempting to take on a heartbreaking subject over the span of one nightmare day. Moody, however, believes in the rule which advises that if in doubt, say it loudly.
Dexter "Hex" Raitliffe, a 38-year-old freelance publicist with a serious speech impediment and a heavy drinking habit, returns home to tend his ailing mother. The novel opens with a long, theatrical address to the reader on the unnatural physical intimacy created between child and parent in such a situation. The tone of this prologue is challenging and impersonal. It is harrowing yet laboured. Moody then prepares to move in on his characters. The narrative, in the intense continuous present, has the manner of a camera reporting the action.
The incapacitated woman, Billie, mother of Hex and now married for the second time, lies in a silent world. For some twenty years she has been slowly wasting away, as her body succumbs to a neurological disease. She no longer moves, barely eats, is incontinent and now has lost the power of speech. There is no hope. But her husband and son are presenting her with a Handispeak, a computer with a voice synthesiser. Its disembodied voice is compared with various things including a dentist's assistant and "an unexpected, overstaying holiday guest". The Handispeak has a hell of a vocabulary. Lots of words. Billie of course resents it. For her the voice is "like nothing so much as the voice of science, the voice of technological advancement, the voice of lasers and digits and particle colliders, of ultra-high-frequency transmissions. A wo man's voice as men would design it." Paralysed and reduced as she is, Billie is the only credible character in the book.
Moody provides her with a previous life as a beautiful woman, widowed early and mother of the beloved baby who grew up into the hapless Hex. Mistress of a gracious home which she furnished with love and style, Billie lived well and engaged with all the small activities of life. "She had been a talker. She had been able to put the awkward at ease; she had been able to comfort children." Now she can't even cry normally: "her tears were of the specifically disabled sort. They came without pounding of fists or oaths, they simply fell, like summer drizzle, no sound accompanying them, just their erratic progress along her cheeks."
Her illness had already introduced a walking stick into her life when she married Lou, who has tended her ever since. Now she seems about to enter yet another critical phase in her gruesome decline, and has clearly lost her will to fight. Lou decides he has had enough and shambles off, leaving the most improbable of farewells on her computer screen: "If you think this means I'm angry, then you're right. If you think I have come to a time when I can no longer care for you, you're right . . . I can't watch you retreat from life this way. Your poverty has tired me out."
Aside from the abruptness of the leave-taking, Lou Sloane soon reveals that he is intellectually, never mind emotionally, well capable of expressing himself in this way. Moody is intent on demonstrating a level of linguistic versatility which he has not yet mastered, and his prose continually jars. The language slips awkwardly between formal and casual, even aggressive, street talk. The character of Hex with his strained speech is particularly inconsistent. Although he ensures Hex's stutter is ever present, Moody makes few other efforts on his part, nor can he quite decide to what class Hex belongs.
Considering the refinements of life Billie provided for him, it is odd that the adult Hex is so ill-formed. The characterisation of Lou is equally undeveloped. Having worked in the local nuclear plant, Lou has gone through life with the minimum of complication until he encounters the reality of Billie's sinister illness. It is his enforced retirement from the plant that finally brings him to a state where he cannot deal with her slow dying.
Too often throughout this ambitious book Moody shows he is trying to match Updike's extraordinary, multi-layered, textured prose. In the sequences featuring Lou Sloane on the run from his sick wife, Moody fails to bring off Updike's dazzling linguistic gear-shifts from New England suburbia to the tougher world of the Rabbit books.
Hex is clumsy and somehow always slightly drunk. The scene in which he folds his wretched mother into a restaurant booth is funny if contrived, and misses the pathos Updike would have wrung from such an episode. When Hex meets up with Jane, the girl he adored from afar when they were both nine, the episode borders on farce. Hardened by life and single motherhood, she is not looking for conventional romance but has not lost her humanity either.
Billie is this novel's heart and life. Though she begs Hex to let her die, he refuses. When he does try, the resulting scene is horribly funny. Armed with a shotgun, he is sitting at her bedside when the police arrive summoned by a car hire firm.
Heavily cinematic in execution Purple America is funny, but not funny enough to make up for either its contrived structure or Moody's unsubtle way of moving his small cast like so many chess pieces. Trapped by her body, Billie retains a powerful sensibility that dwarfs everything around her. Flashbacks from her former world juxtaposed with her current grim perceptions confer a seriousness on this uneven novel, yet although it promises much, it invariably fails, due to a dependence on word pictures seldom matched by sufficient linguistic verve.
